If you bought a digital copy of GTA V for PC and intended to start it as soon as it became available earlier this evening, you may have run into some problems. Players have encountered a few different installation errors so far, and here are some known solutions that might help you.
First, if you bought the game through Steam, it might still claim the game is encrypted, even though it should be unlocked. For most people, simply restarting the Steam client is enough to fix this issue. Once you restart Steam, GTA V will go through a series of steps before it is ready. Some fans have reported the process as taking quite a long time, from 20 or even 40 minutes, while others barely had to wait at all. Once the process is complete, your game should be ready.
Keep in mind, while the installed game only takes up 60 GB of space, it needs twice as much free space while it's installing.
Once GTA V is installed, an update will also be downloaded. At this point, some players receive another error message. If you receive "Error 1" while downloading this update, there's is a patch that fixes the problem, although no official solution has been announced yet.
If you make it through all of these steps, but GTA V gets stuck on a loading screen, restarting the game may allow it to proceed.
Finally, if you get an error message that says "The Rockstar update service is unavailable (code 1)" while installing GTA V, or if the update download stalls, this may actually be a problem with your Windows username. Rockstar has published a table showing the currently accepted characters. If your Windows username contains characters not listed there, you may run into problems. Creating a new account using the allowed characters should allow you to play, and Rockstar is working on a solution.
These are the current solutions and workarounds to the most common GTA V installation errors. If you're still having problems, let us know in the comments and we'll see if we can find anything out.
